let this radicalize you

It’s been a long week. My good friend died last Tuesday, a deadly, gargantuan storm decimated my mountains on Friday, this week marked one year since I left ministry, and tomorrow is the anniversary of my grandma’s death. Also, my home congregation - where that grandma grew up - is selling their building and deciding whether or not they’ll continue existing. And, well, you know: election nonsense, a world hurtling toward another war and, apparently, an eclipse.

I’d like to write about each of those things, and I will at some point. But I also signed a contract yesterday for a freelance gig that is essentially full-time work through the end of the year (a relief!) and, to be frank, my circuits are just sort of overwhelmed with grief at the moment.

That’s not an appeal for sympathy, it’s just an honest accounting of where I am. Grief opens up our hearts in weird ways, and it turns out that the world is filled with some awful, scary, horrible things worthy of lament and heartbreak. I’m just trying to let my heart break in the ways it needs to, over here.

I’ve also been reading Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba’s “Let This Radicalize You” this week, a book that’s been on my TBR for a while and one I knew I needed to save for a moment when I needed some encouragement. The title is from an oft-quoted line of Kaba’s: “let this radicalize you, not lead you to despair.” And the book is a pathway for exactly that: the back cover calls it “a practical guide and imaginative resource for building power in an era of destabilization and catastrophe.”

The world feels very apocalyptic to me, these days. Lots of stuff is crumbling and chaotic. The systems, structures, people and places many of us expected to save us are failing spectacularly to do that. Wringing our hands will not help. Prolonging the collapses won’t, either. Building new networks, trying out new tactics, weaving communities of care and compassion alongside, outside, even smack dab in the middle of the crumbling ones: that’s what we’ve got. I’m grateful for the vision of another way.

From Kelly Hayes’ Introduction:

I know these are frightening and even soul-shaking times. I cannot tell you that the tumult will relent, because it will not. But I can tell you that there, on the edge of everything, we are each other’s best hope. As organizers, we are builders in an era of collapse. Our work is set against all probability - and it is in that space of cherished improbability where our art will be made, where our joy will be found, and where our ingenuity will fashion ways of living and caring for each other, even as the ground shifts beneath our feet. Life will be a scramble, but we will not scramble alone.